Elevate Your Analog Layout Design to New Heights

Analog IC layout is a demanding endeavor as it entails conforming to complex layout design rules, interpreting design intentions from the schematics and understanding arcane topics like transistor matching, noise tolerance, parasitics and latch up. These skills are often handed down from one generation to the next, one on one, which can be quite time consuming and doesn’t really scale very well as design teams need to grow. One solution is to send your IC layout designers to a specific training class, taught by experts. I had a chance to speak with members of a 20 year old services and training company, based in Ireland, called IC Mask Design. Ciaran Whyte, Co-Founder and CTO at IC Mask Design spoke with me on a video call to provide a history of the company and explain how they offer both layout training and services for Analog IC design.

The team at IC Mask Design has been training IC layout design for decades now in a live course format, and recently they’ve added an eLearning, self-paced class online to cover the same material. Their training is technology agnostic and EDA vendor agnostic, as it focuses on how to think about IC layout challenges in order to achieve the specific goals. The eLearning course on Advanced IC Layout is based on CMOS bulk technology and instills the best practices for methodology, answering questions like: Why, where, how.

Before COVID struck the globe, all of their courses were conducted on-site. During COVID the training approach quickly adapted to a live online format, as much of the world adjusted to remote working and using video apps. Some students couldn’t make the live training and began requesting recordings of the training sessions. With eLearning the new Advanced Analog Layout course was built up using 100 videos, covering 19 hours of training across several broad topic areas:

• CMOS Base Layer
  • Substrate, Diffusion, Polysilicon, Cross Sections
• Device Layout
  • Introduction, Resistors, Capacitors
• Interconnect Parasitics
  • Resistance, Capacitance, Examples
• Matching
  • Rules & Process Shrink, Identical Unit Device & Orientation, Device Spacing, Common Centroid, Identical Adjacent Conductors, Diode
• Analog Building Blocks
  • Introduction, Current Mirror, Differential Pair & Resistor Ladder, Latch up, PMOS, NMOS, CMOS & SCR
• Substrate Noise Isolation
  • N-Well Guard, Deep N-Well, Course Summary, FEOL Knowledge Check

Yes, there are 13 total assessments during the training process to check that each student is understanding the material before progressing on to the next topic. The videos are inside of a Learning Management System (LMS) from Cobblestone Learning, so participants can proceed chapter by chapter, or use an uninterrupted video block. You even earn a digital certificate at the end of the eLearning process.

You can expect four more eLearning classes to be added in the future, so stay tuned

Summary

The IC layout experts at IC Mask Design have 20 years of experience in delivering live, on-site courses and have now branched out to include their very first eLearning class for Advanced Analog IC Layout. Students will get all of the same information as an on-site experience, delivered in a convenient video format using an LMS, to be taken at your own pace and fitting your schedule. Continuing education is a solid investment for IC layout designers, as it prepares them to be more productive through lessons taught by others that have more experience and practice.

Contact IC Mask Design to get a quote and start the eLearning process for your layout design team. Please attends the replay HERE to see how online learning will benefit your analog layout experience.

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